Saint Paul the Pharisee: Jewish Apostle to All Nations

INTRODUCTION

Saul of Tarsus

The historical person of Saul of Tarsus is the necessary starting point to understand not only the saint but also his writings preserved by the Church in the New Testament. Saul was a man—a man formed by a particular culture in a particular time and place, with a particular education. He operated, during his entire life, within the Roman Jewish world. Yet his letters, or epistles, have long since ceased being communications from a person to communities he had helped found or was seeking to advise. Instead, they have become theological treatises for abstract arguments disconnected from any historical reality. Discussions of the Book of Romans, for example, now enter the realm of speculation over the potential logical order of various decrees in the mind of God—not any actual concerns of Christians, both Jewish and former pagans, in the capital city of the Roman Empire.

Saul of Tarsus lived in the first century ad and spent the vast majority of his life in the Eastern Roman Empire. As a Jewish man who inherited Roman citizenship from his father, he occupied a liminal position in Roman society. Jewish religion, in all its manifold forms, never fit neatly within the religious and cultural milieu of Roman civilization. This reality led to the general oppression of the Jewish people as noncitizens and to occasional outbreaks within St. Paul’s lifetime of more significant forms of persecution. Near the time of his martyrdom, these tensions erupted into open Jewish revolt, leading to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and a brutal, systemic de-judification project throughout Palestine.

Nevertheless, St. Paul’s citizenship exempted him from any number of the indignities suffered by his people. Yet Paul was never a Roman collaborator, nor did he remain long a member or supporter of the violent resistance groups that proliferated during his lifetime. He sought to lead a Jewish way of life and of being in the world despite the external pressures of Rome. As communities formed surrounding his preaching, he led and advised them to adopt the same tack—living out quiet lives in pious simplicity that would let the authorities safely ignore them.

Saint Paul considered himself a Pharisee throughout his life; even Christianity as a label referred to one of many Judaisms extant in the period.1 His encounters with, and commissioning by, the resurrected Jesus of Nazareth caused Paul to identify Him with a particular understanding of the Jewish Messiah. The coming of the Messiah, then, caused Paul to see his life and the lives of the other apostles as standing at the inauguration of a new epoch—an epoch in which he had been called to play a particular role in the working out of the salvation of the world. He sought, more than anything, to faithfully answer this call with his life.

Organization of the Book

This book consists of three elements, two of which have been blended together. First, it is a survey of the life of St. Paul as recorded in the Holy Scriptures and interpreted within the Holy Tradition of the Orthodox Church. Second, the book contains surveys of the writings of St. Paul preserved within the New Testament. These two elements

have been comingled in this presentation for a purpose: Proper interpretation of St. Paul’s epistles requires them to be understood within the historical milieu in which they were composed. His writings are, therefore, here framed within St. Paul’s life and work to facilitate this contextual understanding.

The third element of this book is an interpretive translation of St. Paul’s epistles. In truth, all translation represents an interpretation, but the level of interpretation applied here is unapologetic. I make no pretense of objectivity. The translations in this book are not intended for devotional reading, much less liturgical use. Rather, they are intended to convey the meaning of the original text in a form that, as much as possible, mimics the mode of reception of the original texts as letters. To this end, I have included no chapter or verse numberings, and I have freely added explanatory phrases when necessary to convey meaning. Though these translations are intended to be utilized in tandem with the discussions of the epistles in the relevant chapters, they are not inserted between them. The translations are at the end of the text so that they will not disrupt its flow. In many cases, the overview of St. Paul’s epistles given in the main text will help the reader understand choices made and expressions in the interpretive translations.

Old, New, and Even Newer Perspectives on St. Paul

The Protestant Reformation not only brought about but, in many ways, consisted of a radical reinterpretation of the epistles of St. Paul. This sixteenth-century mode of interpretation, now known somewhat ironically as the “old perspective on Paul,” has more recently fallen out of vogue even in Protestant circles, which are arguably dependent on it. A number of scholars from a Protestant background, beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century, formed what they called the “new perspective on Paul.” They focused on questioning certain basic distinctions of the Protestant Reformation based on a renewed knowledge of the facts on the ground in first-century Palestinian Judaism. As this move to get beyond Reformation-era approaches to reading and understanding St. Paul has gained strength and confidence, it has become common to refer to these views as the “original perspective on Paul.”

The new (“original”) perspective represented a movement to overcome a stereotyped, ahistorical reading of St. Paul’s writings that had become Protestant orthodoxy—with any deviation from that ahistorical approach risking the label of “heresy.” It was not long before various “post-new perspective” movements began that were more comfortable abandoning entirely what is ultimately Martin Luther’s reading of Paul for a more contextual understanding. These movements have culminated in an approach called “Paul within Judaism.” This view of Paul as writing within Judaism rather than participating in the founding of a new religion—or even being the founder of Christianity himself—has opened new vistas of interpretation. This movement has included not only Christian and secular scholars from a variety of backgrounds but also a number of prominent Jewish scholars.

Authorship Questions

Modern scholars typically contest Paul’s authorship of some of the epistles attributed to him. Philippians, Colossians, Ephesians, and what are called the Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, are generally considered to be later compositions under Paul’s name. The Epistle to the Hebrews has raised questions about its authorship since the patristic era. All these texts are treated in this book as being Pauline in content and in authorship.

Pauline authorship represents a spectrum; it is not a single idea. None of St. Paul’s epistles were written by him in the sense that he picked up a writing implement and a parchment or papyrus and wrote them down longhand. He dictated all his epistles to an amanuensis, or secretary. That writer, sometimes identified in the text, would make necessary grammatical and stylistic corrections and then read the result back to Paul. The apostle would make any further corrections community instead of church , or Torah instead of law, I hope to unsettle commonly held notions and help the reader reassess Paul in his historical context, rather than project the experience of present-day Christians into the past.

In addition to the interpretive translations of St. Paul’s epistles, all other translations contained within this book are my own. The particular intent of this book—to move past layers of accretion and read St. Paul in his original context, to see his life in its historical contours— requires moving away from the now stereotyped language found in standard English translations. Theological meanings that have developed over centuries are quickly, even unconsciously, read into familiar terms. For these reasons, translations in the present text will deliberately break with convention in many places.

The overall intent of this work is to allow people to encounter St. Paul the Apostle, the rabbi from Tarsus, the founder of Christian communities throughout the Roman world. Through this encounter, by coming to know the actual, existing Paul, his works can finally be understood as they were written. These are letters written and sermons preached by a real man to groups of real people facing real situations in life. The ongoing importance and, indeed, the scriptural quality of his epistles lie precisely in the way in which he met the issues and challenges of his day as well as how that particularity informs the equally particular situations faced by Christians in the present.

1 Judaism in the first century was not a single, unified religion. The religious lives of Jewish people in various places within the Roman Empire and beyond took on a variety of forms. Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism are both forms of first-century Judaism that have survived to the present day.